Spiffy:

Iffy:

Cut-scenes can drag in their current form; dialogue and voiceover work not too hot.

Imagine traveling to Mars to meet your brother and earn a little cash to make ends meet, only once you get there he hands you a sledgehammer and tells you it's time to start breaking stuff in the name of saving the red planet. That's how Red Faction: Guerrilla starts. I saw it recently at a Las Vegas demo event, and it looks great. It does the sandbox thing remarkably well, but its real highlights come through when the buildings start crashing down to earth. Err, Mars.

Environmental destruction is what Red Faction: Guerrilla is all about, and while it's fun to kill time destroying buildings and romping through Mars (which has been supplied with some mighty nice dirt roads) your real goal is to take out the Earth Defense Force. As protagonist Alec Mason, you'll have plenty of opportunity to stick it to them, whether you're on a mission or on an impromptu demolition derby. Guerrilla sees the EDF morphed from the series' good guys into the oppressive rulers who have turned Mars into a police state. After joining your brother and the rest of the Red Faction, your job becomes to take out the EDF and build "colonist" morale at the same time. While killing EDF soldiers helps the Red Faction's cause, smashing the EDF's concrete and steel infrastructure works just as well, and is more immediately satisfying.

Indiscriminately running around and breaking stuff can be dangerous, however. The louder your tools of demolition, the quicker the EDF will respond to your destructive behavior. Whacking away at EDF structures with the standard-issue sledgehammer draws the least attention, whereas remote charges, mines and rocket launchers will definitely attract some heat. It was tempting for me to go wild with the hammer and smash through walls and girders as if they were made of peanut brittle, but I died more times than I'd care to admit by doing that. The usual cause of death? Buried by own handiwork as the structures collapsed on top of me.

Even so, a few embarrassing failures were a small price to pay, since it was extremely satisfying watching the physics model do its work as all those structures broke apart and collapsed. For example, as I sat back and admired my work after detonating an EDF tower with three remote charges, pieces of concrete and metal kept breaking off and falling into each other until the tower eventually crumbled, a process that took about 20 seconds to complete. Nothing like watching an enemy structure fold and fall into itself to make you feel like you've had a productive day.